Eagle Computer

~ the eulogy ~

Eagle Computer began inside an audio-visual business. Audio-Visual Laboratories built control gear for multi-image slide shows, the kind that drove thirty Kodak projectors off a timecode track, and in 1980 it shipped a non-dedicated controller called the Eagle. The machine ran CP/M well enough that people started buying it to be a computer. AVL spun the business off as its own company, and the CP/M Eagles that followed got good reviews in magazines that were paying attention to a market still small enough to review everything in it.

Then IBM published the PC and the ground moved. Eagle's answer was the 1600 series, which ran MS-DOS but was not a clone and tried, like the DEC Rainbow and the Tandy 2000, to be better than IBM at something. Buyers wanted the same. Eagle worked that out before most of its competitors did, and the Eagle PC 2 that followed was close enough to an IBM PC to run what an IBM PC ran, in a smaller box with no fan in it. Underneath was a garage you slid the keyboard into, which saved buying a drawer. The Computer History Museum dates the machine to 1982 and lists it at $2,385.

Wikipedia's infobox puts the founding at 1978 and cites nothing for it. The AVL product existed in 1980 and the separate company followed Dennis Barnhart's arrival from Commodore in 1981, so the founding year is a guess in every source that gives one. The ending is not. Eagle filed Chapter 7 and went out of business on 30 July 1986, a little over three years after the morning it rang the bell.

~ the dossier ~

~ june 8, 1983 ~

Eagle's offering priced on 8 June 1983 and valued Barnhart's stock at around nine million dollars. That afternoon he and Sheldon Coughey, who sold yachts, took Barnhart's Ferrari 308 GTS out near the company's headquarters. The driver took a corner too fast. The car tore out twenty feet of guardrail and came down on its roof in a ravine past the embankment. Barnhart was 39 and died there. Coughey was critically hurt and recovered. Two weeks afterward the newspapers reported Barnhart's blood alcohol at 0.14 percent against a California limit of 0.10.

The version that gets retold has him celebrating the IPO by shopping for a Ferrari and a yacht. Dave Farquhar, who went back through the contemporary accounts, found something duller and sadder: Barnhart had bought the Ferrari two months earlier and put EAGLE B plates on it. He was trying to sell his Porsche, and Coughey had come by that day to look at the Porsche. The newspapers of the day do not even agree on which man was driving, which was easier to be unsure about in a state that did not require seat belts until 1986.

~ the bios settlement ~

In February 1984 IBM sued, claiming Eagle had copied the BIOS. The two sides settled fast and no money is reported to have changed hands, but the terms were the expensive part: Eagle stopped manufacturing and wrote a replacement BIOS of its own. A company selling twelve thousand machines a month does not get those months back. Phoenix Technologies shipped its clean-room BIOS that July and anybody could buy one after that, which made the thing Eagle had been sued over into a part you ordered.

Whether Eagle had done its own reverse engineering cleanly is still argued. Most public accounts say it had not. A former employee has said it did. The lawsuit was one item in a sequence rather than the whole cause, but it is the item that stopped production in the months when the clone market was settling who would survive it.

~ july 30, 1986 ~

By the end there were fewer than a dozen people left. On 4 August 1986 the New York Times carried a piece by Daniel Cuff and Dee Wedemeyer under a headline about Eagle's chief assessing an American tragedy, which is how a Chapter 7 gets written up when the company has a famous death attached to it. I was two when the company filed and fourteen when I first got online, so this is a machine I know only from photographs, in the one posture old clones are always photographed in, lid off and beige. What the photographs do not carry is the order of events. The Ferrari is the part everyone repeats, and the BIOS settlement is the part that ended the company.

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